Some free floating quotes on the state of human kind, contempt, bordeom, the quotidian, and a Sudoku question

Why not use your fluttering tongue to wipe the sweat off of that starling who is trying to strip off her wings. It's so distant of you, my aroboreal lover on the outskirts of town. From the shadow of the clothes hanging in a thrift shop, a single antelope watches you. Steel-colored eyes of contempt. Takashi Hiraide, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (trans. by Sawaka Nakayasu)

Or, Cyril Connolly from The Unquiet Grave:
Beneath a mask of selfish tranquility nothing exists except bitterness and boredom. I am one of those whom suffering has made empty and frivolous: each night in my dreams I pull the scab off a wound; each day, vacuous and habit-ridden, I help it re-form.

When I contemplate the accumulation of guilt and remorse which, like a garbage-can, I carry through life, and which is fed not only by the lightest action but by the most harmless pleasure, I feel Man to be of all living things the most biologically incompetent and ill-organized. Why has he acquired a seventy-years' life-span only to poison it incurably by the mere being of himself? Why has he thrown Conscience, like a dead rat, to putrefy in the well?

And back to Takashi Hiraide:
One day, in the afternoon after the rain, on the escalator going from the west side of the first floor to the second floor of the Takashimaya store in Nihonbashi, I saw a single snail in front of me, and found myself sighing deeply at the pointlessness of his rhyme. Would he now proceed to the grocery on the rooftop, or head straight to the kitchen of the dining hall. Or perhaps he has some shopping to do. At least get yourself up to the magic section, little spiral. I whispered words of encouragement, but all I saw was maybe a shy little twitch of the tentacles.

By the way, is there diminishing returns of pleasure on Sudoku?

~posted by Postillion